The present invention generally relates to network failure detection and notification and the methods of producing the same. In particular, the invention relates to methods and other accommodations for notifying a network device of an outage.
As technology progresses, customers have more and more interaction with data networks which are used to provide services such as telephone, Internet data and cable television. While the providers of these services have advanced systems for monitoring the health and status of the network, customers currently are not notified of outages in the network. As a result, a consumer will first discover an outage when they attempt to use the service without success.
Once a customer has unsuccessfully attempted to use one of the services provided by the network, they may call a customer service center for the provider of the service to report the outage. If a outage is restricted to the customer's service only, the customer service center will attempt to correct the problem with little impact on the operations of the customer service center. However, for wide spread outages caused by a fault or other failure in the data network, the customer service center may be inundated with hundreds or thousands of phone calls which may result in customers having long hold times or receiving a busy signal when they call. Additionally, the call volume to the service centers during the outage will last for the duration of the outage as more and more customers call the customer service center after unsuccessful attempting to use their service.